The technological background is illustrated by Patents U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,699,269, 4,971,915 and by the publication by SEINSCHEK et al. "Anwendung Der PLS-Regressions Methode Auf Daten der Gaschromatographie Und Der Ir-Spektroskopie [Use of PLS Regression Methods on Gas-Chromatography and IR-Spectroscopy Data] Quality Control of Jet Fuels--PLS Regression Analysis of Gas-Chromatographic and Ir-Spectroscopic Data," Erdoel Erdgas Kohle, Vol. 112, No. 6, June 1996, pages 261-263 XP000641535).
Traditionally, the analytical methods that relate to determining petroleum properties in hydrocarbons take a long time to carry out and are thus very time-consuming. Petroleum products consist of thousands of compounds. These products are thus generally identified and classified based on some of the properties, such as, for example: the range of distillation, density, and the cetane number.
Gas chromatography has been used to predict petroleum properties in gasoline-type petroleum products. Crawford and Hellmuth, Fuel, 1990, 69, 443-447, describe a chromatographic analysis that is able to predict the octane numbers of various effluents that come from the refinery, by application of mathematical models that are based on the statistical technique of principal component regression (PCR). Japanese Patent JP 03-100463 relates to a method that makes it possible to predict the cetane number from a specific analysis by coupling gas chromatography to mass spectrometry. The predicted cetane number is calculated by multilinear regression from the intensities of the selective ions.
These methods are therefore able to determine a global property of a product that contains hydrocarbon, but they are not suitable for providing data on this property as a function of the boiling points of the components of the product.